DITOR'S OVERVIEW
"A Higher View of Things"
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n 1884, British clergyman and amateur mathematician Edwin
Abbott wrote
Flatland,
a book about the incredible adventures
of A. Square, a rather flat character who lived in two dimensions
only. For A. Square, the universe consisted of a single plane; reality
(and that's
all
reality) went either north and south, or east and west.
The notions of up and down, height and depth, were inconceivable.
A. Square once visited Lineland, whose inhabitants lived in a
single straight line alone; this meant that, for them, reality existed
as forward or backward only. Linelanders could not even begin to
conceive of anything such as width, and when A. Square tried to
explain that there was a greater dimension to reality than a mere
line, the notion was rebuffed by Linelanders as absurd.
A. Square then visited Pointland, where all reality consisted only
of a single point: There was no forward or backward (as in Lineland)
or no width (as in Flatland), and trying to convince anyone in
Pointland otherwise was as futile as trying to convince those in
Lineland that sideways existed.
Then one day A. Square was visited by someone from Spaceland,
a person who lived in three dimensions. A. Square thought it ludi-
crous, this notion of a reality beyond the two dimensions that made
up the universe as it appeared to him. However, only after a visit to
Spaceland, did he eventually accept what he called "a higher view
of things." In fact, he tried to convince his Spaceland guide that
there could be dimensions of existence beyond even Spaceland, a
notion that his Spaceland guide rejected as "utterly inconceivable,"
just as Pointlanders did with the idea of forward and backward, as
Linelanders did with the notion of sideways, and as A. Square first
did with the concept of height.
This quarter's study deals with the Old Testament book of Amos,
which reads almost like Abbott's
Flatland,
in the sense that it tells
about Someone, in this case the Lord, trying to help a people
understand a reality that goes beyond what's immediately acces-
sible to their senses. The Israelites were living only for the moment,
within the narrow confines of their little world, where things seemed
(and we stress that word
seemed)
so good. The reality, of course—
which was greater than the narrow view of reality that they knew—
turned out to be radically different from how it appeared. And, like
those in Pointland, Lineland, Flatland, and even in Spaceland, they
wouldn't easily listen to the One who tried to give them a broader,
wider, and more encompassing perspective.
And, no doubt, Leo Van Dolson, the author of this quarter's
Bible Study Guide, would like us, as we study these lessons, to ask
ourselves the crucial question:
Are we limiting our view of reality to
only what we see, or will we open our hearts to the One who has,
through the revelation of His Son, given us "a higher view of
things"?
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